In the Moon of Red Ponies bbh-4

by James Lee Burke

  He felt his loins tingle, his hand close on the steering wheel, and again wondered who was controlling whom.

  “I already ate. I’m on the clock, anyway,” he said.

  “Good, that makes two of us. I have to be back here by three. Follow me to my motel. There’s a restaurant next door where you can park the cruiser. I’m in room six.”

  She pinched his chin, got in her SUV, and drove off.

  He waited five minutes, filling out the log for the cruiser, then followed her. He parked on the far side of the restaurant, bought a roll of breath mints from the cashier, used the restroom, and exited the building by the same door he had entered. He cut behind the building, found Greta’s room on the back side of the motel, and knocked on the door.

  She opened it on the chain, and through the crack he could see she already had her shirt off. She slipped the chain and let him in, then rechained the door and set the night lock. The curtains were closed, the air-conditioning unit turned on full blast, the room as frigid and dark as the interior of an icehouse. She worked her painter’s pants off and kicked them into a corner. “Come on, honey bunny, the clock’s ticking,” she said.

  He couldn’t quite believe the facility and level of intensity with which she entered lovemaking-almost like a prostitute, but with an obvious and unembarrassed joy. She came before he did, then mounted him and came a second time with him, collapsing next to him, laughing, biting his ear.

  “That one put me on the moon,” she said.

  “I hear that a lot,” he said.

  “Don’t take a compliment lightly,” she said, and hit him playfully with her knee. Then, before he could reply, she was in the shower.

  Was she jerking him around as badly as he was beginning to think? Maybe it was time to find out. She came out of the bathroom, blotting at her hair with a folded towel, another towel wrapped around her. She touched at a red swelling under her arm, examining it, then saw him watching her and lowered her arm.

  “Ever hear of two guys by the names of L. W. Peeples and Tex Barker?” he asked.

  She faced the opposite direction, dropped her towel, and began putting on her undergarments. “No, who are they?” she said.

  “Their names have turned up in the B amp;E investigation on your house.”

  She was hooking up her bra now and he could see her face.

  “These were the men who broke in?” she said.

  “No, a source in the investigation says these names were written down someplace in your house. The perpetrator or perpetrators was after names and information, not money or jewelry. That’s what all this seems to be about, Greta-information. What do you say about that?”

  She bent over and began putting on her painter’s pants. She lifted her eyes into his. “I say I think that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “You don’t know anybody named L. W. Peeples or Tex Barker?”

  “What did I just tell you?”

  Her eyes were unblinking, her indignation convincing.

  “How about somebody named Mabus?” he asked.

  She buttoned her painter’s pants, her face lowered now, her jaws flexing with the effort to fasten a button. She reached over to pick up her shirt from a chair, and in the side of her eye he saw the bright glimmer of fear. “You do know somebody named Mabus?” he said.

  “I’ve heard his name mentioned in business conversations. I don’t know how he could have anything to do with the destruction of my house.”

  “I think Wyatt Dixon had the name of this guy in his possession. Why would a hayseed like Dixon be interested in it?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, Darrel.”

  She tried to look abstract and uninterested, but he could see the prickles in her throat.

  “I like you a lot, Greta,” he said, almost surprised at the genuineness in his statement. “I think you’re in trouble and can’t tell anybody about it. Sometimes people just get in over their heads. It’s like making a wrong turn in a bad neighborhood. You don’t know how you got there, but suddenly you’re drowning in a world of hurt. If you can be square with me, maybe we can get you out of this.”

  “Perhaps you mean well, but this scenario you’re describing is comic opera. Really, I mean it. You’re a nice guy, but-” She picked up her cute white hat and placed it on her head. “You’re looking at a Maryland country girl, Darrel. There’s no mystery here. Just an upper South gal trying to make it out here in the Wild West.”

  He was sitting on the bed in his trousers and strap undershirt, his shoulders rounded. Her denial filled him with a sense of depression like a chemical assault on his system. It was always ordinary people who got in the gravest trouble with the law, he thought. In a peculiar way they retained their innocent belief in a benevolent society that was created especially for them, right up to the time they shuffled off on a wrist chain and entered the belly of the beast.

  “Why so glum?” she asked.

  “No reason. Thanks for the nooner.”

  She wagged a finger at him. “I like you a lot, Darrel, but I don’t appreciate coarseness. My father was a minister and I grew up in a good home,” she said.

  Late the next evening two men pulled up in front of a bar on the lower end of the Blackfoot River, not far from the confluence it formed with the Clark Fork. Their pickup truck had an Idaho tag, and fishing rods were propped up in the bed of the truck. The men stood outside the truck, drinking beer from cans, surveying the stilt houses on the riverbank, the independent grocery store across the state road, kids jumping from an abandoned steel bridge into the river, the smoke from the sawmill drifting up the walls of the Blackfoot Canyon. The evening light was a greenish-yellow, the air warm and cool at the same time, the bloom from cottonwood trees floating on the breeze.

  One man was truncated, his muscular arms too short for his torso. He had a high forehead, receding hairline, and eyes that were set too low in his face. He wore heavy shoes with thick heels and double soles, a wide leather belt through the loops of his jeans, a faded purple T-shirt with a winged dragon printed on it, and a nylon vest that still had a sales tag on it. There were furrows in his brow, as though he were frowning, but in reality a worried look was his natural expression.

  His companion was tall and had a formless posture and skin that was milky and dotted with moles. He wore an old fedora, a dark shirt that hung outside his pants, and leather-laced alpine trail shoes that were dusty from wear. He finished his beer and leaned against a headlight on the truck, his chest slightly caved, his stomach protruding over his belt. He watched a young woman pull her laundry from a coin-operated machine, next door to the bar. When the woman looked up and realized she was being stared at, he tipped his hat to her and shifted his attention elsewhere.

  The two men went inside the bar and ordered hamburgers and fries and cups of coffee. While they waited for their food, they took turns walking to the front door and glancing outside.

  “You boys expecting somebody?” the bartender said.

  “No, can’t say we are,” the taller man said. He let his eyes linger on the bartender’s until the bartender looked away. “We were wondering if it’s too late in the day to get on the stream. I hear the salmon flies are hatching.”

  “There’s still a few hatching out,” the bartender said.

  “That’s what I thought,” the taller man said, nodding, looking at the door.

  “Your food’s ready,” the bartender said.

  The men ate in silence, sometimes gazing at the massive elk head mounted over the front entrance or at someone playing the pinball machine. The truncated man used the pay phone, then sat back down and finished his coffee. “You know a cowboy name of Wyatt Dixon?” he asked the bartender.

  “He comes in for his beer,” the bartender replied. He was a dark-haired, broad-chested man who had been a gypo-an independent or wandering logger-before he had suffered a heart attack, and the backs of his broad hands were laced with boomer-chain scars. Now he served drinks in a saloon an
d wore a waxed mustache for the benefit of tourists.

  “He comes in on Thursday nights?” the truncated man said.

  The bartender wiped the bar idly, then propped his arms on it, his gaze fixed on nothing. “Wyatt don’t bother anybody. Least not here he don’t. If you got the wrong kind of business with him, you take it somewhere else,” he said.

  The man in the fedora put a toothpick in his mouth. “We owe him some money for some rough stock. That’s why we asked if he came in here. Otherwise we wouldn’t be troubling you. Can you relate to that?” he said.

  “The two burgers and the coffee are eleven dollars,” the bartender said.

  When the two fishermen left, the bartender walked to the front window, studied their license tag, and wrote the number in pencil on the doorjamb. Then he rubbed the number out with the palm of his hand and marked off the whole affair as none of his business.

  Temple was the best investigator I ever knew. When she could not find information using conventional means, she would spend hours or days on the Internet, in libraries and county clerks’ offices, or on the telephone cajoling information out of various law enforcement agencies. I should have known she would not rest until she found out exactly who Tex Barker and L. W. Peeples were.

  The same evening the two fishermen had visited the bar on the Blackfoot, Temple got off the phone in our home office and came into the living room, a clipboard in her hand. She blew her breath upward to remove a strand of hair from her eyes. “Don’t trust computers,” she said.

  “What have you got?” I said.

  “Wyatt Dixon told you he heard about one of these guys while he was in San Quentin? Something about a guy who’d do a yard job on another inmate for thirty dollars, right? But the computer search at the NCIC didn’t pick up the names ‘Barker’ and ‘Peeples’ as Quentin graduates, at least not during the time frame Dixon was there.

  “So I broadened the search through the entirety of the California system. A guy named Jeff Barker was in Soledad and Atascadero during the same period Dixon was at Quentin. So I called up Soledad and talked to a psychologist there who remembered him. Barker’s nickname was Tex. He’s not from Texas, though. He got his nickname because he loves Tex-Mex food and was always smuggling it into his cell and heating it up on a stinger and blowing the circuit breaker on the cell block.

  “Same computer problem finding L. W. Peeples. Because there is no L. W. Peeples. But a guy named Lynwood Peeples, from Opa Locka, Florida, was in the computer. As it turned out, Lynwood was a cellmate of Barker in Soledad.”

  “You always amaze me,” I said.

  “Why?” she said, amused, blowing her breath up into her face again.

  She was sitting on the couch, across from me, her hair lit by a floor lamp. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. Her shoulders felt smooth and firm, her upper arms taut from the daily kick-boxer workouts she did on the heavy bag hanging in the barn. I kissed the back of her neck.

  “Better listen to what else I found out about these two,” she said.

  “Can it wait?”

  “No, these guys are real assholes. Barker was a suspect in the rape of a couple of children. While he was in Soledad, the blacks were using white guys who had a short-eyes jacket for bars of soap, so he did some yard hits with an ice pick for both the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Brotherhood. He’s been out four years now, with no arrests, which is unusual for a guy whose sheet goes back two decades.

  “Lynwood Peeples grew up on a horse farm in northern Dade County. He hung a lot of paper and got caught doping a quarter horse at a summer track in California. I called Miami-Dade P.D. and talked to a homicide cop who said Peeples probably jobs out for the Mob, but they’re not sure. Get this. When he was seventeen, he married a fifteen-year-old girl from Georgia. Two years later, what was left of her body showed up in the Everglades.”

  “Peeples did it?”

  “It’s anybody’s guess. He reported her missing and claimed she was always running off with migrant farmworkers down at Florida City. The body was so decomposed and eaten by crabs the coroner couldn’t even determine the cause of death.”

  Outside, the top of the sky was still lit, the valley floor dark, the hillsides streaked with shadows made by the trees. Our windows were open and I could hear our horses blowing in the pasture and smell the odor of wet grass and water coursing through the irrigation ditches.

  I wondered how men such as these could come into our midst, here in a verdant world that in some ways was little different from the way Earth must have looked on the sixth day of creation.

  “Does either of these guys have a military background?” I asked.

  She glanced through her notes and several fax sheets attached to her clipboard. “None that I could find. Why?”

  “The two killers who went after Johnny American Horse were ex-soldiers. But Johnny turned the pair of them into lunch meat. I think whoever is hiring these guys decided to reach down into the bottom of the septic tank for the real article.”

  Temple set the clipboard beside her, her eyes straight ahead. I heard her exhale her breath. “You think they’re coming after us?” she asked.

  “We’re no threat to them. They’ll figure that out,” I said, my voice tight with my lie.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said.

  She got up and walked toward the dining room. Then I heard her pause in the doorway. “You coming?” she said.

  But I didn’t get up from the couch. “I think I’ve gotten us into a bad one, Temple,” I said.

  “If they come here, they’ll wish they hadn’t. Come on, Ranger. I can’t fall asleep by myself,” she said.

  The dawn broke cool and misty on the Blackfoot, the sky crackling with electricity from an impending storm, the river green and swollen with rain. Smoke flattened off the chimney of Wyatt Dixon’s house and a light burned in the kitchen. Wyatt came outside in only jeans and a T-shirt, notched an apple in half while he watched the sun’s glow spread on the mountain crests, then fed half the apple off the flat of his hand to his Appaloosa and ate the other half himself. His T-shirt was printed with the words RODEO NAKED-YOUR CHEEKS NEED THE COLOR.

  He heard rocks toppling down the hillside behind him, but when he looked up through the fir trees he saw two mountain sheep working their way up an arroyo and he paid no more attention to the sounds they made. A moment later someone started a vehicle on the dirt road that curved away around a wooded bend. Wyatt heard the transmission clank into gear, then the tires clicking on the gravel as the vehicle headed in the opposite direction. He went back inside, fired his woodstove, poured coffee grinds and water into a tin pot, and set the pot to boil.

  Down the road someone was having a fight. He heard a woman shout, then a car or truck door slam, followed by more shouting. Enough was enough. He opened the kitchen window and stuck his head out. “Shut up that goddamn racket!” he yelled.

  It was warm and snug in the kitchen, the iron lids on his stove etched with light from the firebox. The rest of the lower floor had been destroyed by river ice, but the kitchen had been built on higher ground and the glass was still in the windows, the shelves, icebox, and chimney intact. He heated a skillet, then poured flapjack batter into it and broke eggs on the side. He removed a jar of jam and a stick of butter and a loaf of bread from the icebox, toasted the bread in a separate skillet, and sat down to eat.

  He looked up and saw a fat Indian woman with braids staring at him through the window. Before he could get up from the chair, she had gone around to the front of the house. A moment later, she was pounding on the door with her fist.

  “Nobody home! Get out of here!” he yelled.

  “Help me!” she cried.

  He walked through the clutter in the front of the house and jerked open the door. “Was you the woman yelling her head off down the road?” he said.

  She smelled of sweat, talcum powder, river damp, and alcohol, and her dress looked like a burlap tent fitted over a haystack. Her l
eft eye was swollen and watery, as though it had been stung by a bee. “My husband says he’s gonna kill me and my baby. Call the police,” she said.

  “See any phone wires going to this house?” Wyatt said.

  “He’s got a knife. He took the car keys and run up the hill,” she said.

  Wyatt walked out onto the grass. He gazed up the hill and at the trees and at the birds singing in them and at the steam rising off the river. Dry thunder rippled across the sky. He watched his Appaloosa in the railed lot in back of the house. The Appaloosa was eating grass through the fence, tearing it out in divots. “Where’s the baby at?” Wyatt said.

  “In my car. I ran away. I was scared,” she said.

  “Your baby is in the car and your old man is up on that hill and you’re here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I tell you what. I got to take a shower. Bring your baby to the house and I’ll drive y’all into Missoula. I’ll leave the door unlocked. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear no more yelling or carrying on out here.”

  He closed the door in her face.

  The woman walked back down the road and around the bend the road made between two wooded hills. Wyatt stood among the water-damaged furniture in his living room, tossing a cell phone and catching it in his palm. She was a half-breed, he thought, one he had seen somewhere before. A truck stop outside Billings or Bozeman? He wasn’t sure. Truckers called them pavement princesses. This one looked more like Native America’s answer to the Bride of Frankenstein, he thought.

  But the important fact was that she hadn’t asked him if he had a cell phone, even though it had been sticking out of his jeans pocket in full view. He flipped open his cell and brought up the numbers he kept in the memory bank. He looked at my number, pushed the dial button, then thought about it a moment and killed the call. He slipped the cell back in his pocket and went upstairs to the shower.

  He turned on the water and put his hand inside the spray until steam began to drift out the open window. He pulled off his T-shirt and hung it on the outside doorknob, brushed his teeth in the basin, and spit. When he looked into the mirror, his own face reminded him of the edge of a hatchet. Through the window he heard his Appaloosa nicker in the lot.